Intimidating the enemy: An assessment of power imaging in four Cold War presidential administrations

Power imaging is the purposeful projection of intimidating rhetoric and actions on the part of nation-states intended to induce restraint or compliance on the part of an adversary. Throughout history, city-states, empires, and nation-states have used power imaging as a means to affect favorable transformation of the foreign policies of adversarial polities while circumventing the actualization of force. The shrewdly projected image of military-strategic power and political resolve has often proved sufficient in accomplishing such ends. The age of the cold war (1945-1991) was characterized by polarized tensions between the world's two greatest powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. This war was of a psychological, philosophical, and geostrategic nature. Furthermore, the cold war was waged while both adversaries possessed the unprecedented destructive capability inherent in nuclear weapons. Despite the severe antagonisms separating these two nation-states, particularly against the ominous backdrop of potential nuclear exchange, power imaging remained a successful strategy for inducing constraint or compliance on the part of the adversary. This study assesses how four American presidents during the cold war--Eisenhower, Kennedy, Carter, and Reagan--utilized power imaging against the Soviet Union with varying degrees of success. An assessment of the evidence, based on logical inference and corroborated by recently accessible Soviet and American primary source material, suggests that those presidents (i.e., Eisenhower and Reagan) who were guided in their actions by a sense of pragmatism and realism were better able to initiate both declaratory and operational policies that had intimidating effects. Those presidents who prided themselves on their own sense of righteousness and an ability to negotiate away interstate differences (i.e., Wilson, FDR, Kennedy, Carter) were invariably poor practitioners of power imaging. This latter group of presidents also tended to be less experienced in the real world and, subsequently, quite utopian in their perspective on human nature and the self-interest of nation-states. Realists, rather than ideologues, appear to be more prudent in their approach to human nature.